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Wow. Nothing like complicating the horrendously easy... I mean, cutting down a tree with a knife is possible, but any good Game Master will make sure that knife is dulled enough times that sharpenning it becomes an issue, not of time, but of whittling the knife to a nub by the time the tree is cut down. I mean, it's possible to do, just not really advisable.

And kicking a stone wall hurts. When an object that large, heavy and set is acted upon by a force, it reacts with the same force, having nowhere to allow for give. Kicking a ball doesn't hurt much because the amount of force needed to move it really isn't that bad. If you want to kick a wall down, go ahead, but expect to take a lot of damage to your leg by the time you're done.

Same with weapons. First off, slicing a rock with a knife is a horribly grating experience. It gives me shivers up and down my spine, just thinking about it. It's not comfortable. Smacking it with a sword is going to send a rather nasty, painful shock through the sword causing you to drop it, or at least think twice about bashing walls with it. This is akin to the idea of smacking a house with a baseball bat. Sure, you cause damage, but not without making yourself very uncomfortable in the process.

"Damage absorbtion" is a fine rule, but I think it would apply more to armor than to anything else. How much damage can a spot of armor take before the damage breaks through and hits the person inside? How often do we see bullets that can punch through a bullet-proof vest? And some of those aren't even armor-piercing; they're just high calibre and close range. I believe someone posted a rule I quite liked in regards to this... I just haven't the heart to go out looking for it.

Anyway, even when it comes to role-playing, the KISS rule is always in effect. The simpler you keep your rules and the quicker you resolve the action, the more fun it is going to be for everyone. When you complicate things like that, it becomes a math test with improv drama thrown in because the teacher wants to make everyone look silly.

Drama Geek,
Dekrain Kole
"Math? What math?"

ever since I had lengthly debates with my (at the time) GM of 15 years of about if AR was a natural number I has not ha a fondness for the AR system. the weapon armour series of PB suplements does have some good rules for an alternative to basic AR but those were too cumbersome for my liking. untill I happened apon a nice neat system.

Damage reduction. and not the damage reduction in D&D.

in effect I changed the AR to an amount of of damage absorbtion. I ditched the original AR and asigned a similarly basic amount of damage that the armour took before any damage was applied to the wearer.
as an example, plate armour had a DR of 7, meaning it would ablate the 1st 7 points of damage and anything more than 7 (minus the DR) would be inflicted to the wearer. it shifted the focus of defence to the parry skill and not the strike roll. it still meant that crits were dangerous and did away with the situation of plate only being penetrated with a crit (grossly unfair IMO) but a crit still did a goodly amount of damge (if you rolled well).

and the same system was used for inanimate objects like walls, doors, carts and stone walls. the inherant strength of the structure and it's method of construction deturmined it's DR. GM's discression still played it's part (as it should) when the players took the time to describe a strategy of reducing the effectiveness of DR.

in the end it was a basic measure of the toughness of an item and worked better than AR.

I also altered some weapons and some magic (refering to alchemist add ons) to suit the DR way and it worked out to be about 2 pages of notes at font point 10 in MS:Word.
It also added no extra dice rolls and added no extra time to the combat sequence, in keeping with the simple cinematic ideal that is RPG combat.

My long version of damage reducing armor is actually shorter to explain: see Compendium of Weapons, Armor, and Castles. The RFs of armor work fine with Palladium weapon damages, especially when you allow critical hits to either double damage or bypass armor. Apply dex modifiers to dodges and parries, and you're done.

My shorter version requires you to take the "common" AR of an armor and subtract 4. That's its RF, and you subtract that from all damage done by an attack. You then take 1/10th the armor's weight and apply it as a dex modifier to dodges and parries.

Now, in both cases, firearms get a PV, which simply knocks points off the RF. This PV is about double the standard from the CCW if you're using the first system, or about half-again as much if you're using the second. Armor takes damage, of course, but different amounts; it takes an amount equal to the wearer from thrusting, and chopping weapons. It takes an amount equal to the PV from ballistic weapons. And it takes full damage from bashing weapons, or anything designed to be anti-armor (like picks). So while a warhammer won't do more damage to someone in armor, it will trash his armor faster, which was part of its original point.

But then you get into images of someone with a warhammer somehow battering leather armour to ribbons, and ruining is faster than a chap going at that armour with a katana.

Tigermuppetcut wrote:But then you get into images of someone with a warhammer somehow battering leather armour to ribbons, and ruining is faster than a chap going at that armour with a katana.

True, but its better that's simple enough to explain... the extra damage is caused by your ribs poking through.

Seriously, though, the "quickie" form is a bit less perfect. If you use the full, CWAC version, then damage = damage let through. That's because the full version has different RFs for different damage types. Then the warhammer will still beat up the leather a bit quicker than the longsword, but not terribly so.

I liked the CWAC stuff, in principle.
I did not agree with the damages and such but I did use it as a reference when porting rules and stuff to get a PB standard.

I set a seperate dodge and Parry modifyer based on DR. but DR was based on other factors it was just easy to do.
it also worked well with magical properties. being weightless really made the property worth having, in combat mechanic terms.